Open Source Tools and Digital Sovereignty

This article was originally published as part of a series of articles on our LinkedIn page:

I got my first real six-string… no, wait, my first computer in the summer of 1982. For a teenager who only knew computers from Star Trek and other Science Fiction shows, the Commodore 64 was a dream machine — a magical device that could turn from a gaming console (Pac-Man!) or a rudimentary music production tool into a typewriter with an endless supply of virtual paper. I was in heaven, with clouds and rainbows in 16 glorious colors.

Software for those early Commodore and Atari home computers was sold on 5.25-inch floppy disks (or, as teenagers say these days: “Aw, how cute – they 3D-printed the ‘Save’ icon!”)

If you actually created content, such as Pac-Man scores or unfinished novels, it was saved on those disks (or tapes if you couldn’t afford that flashy Commodore 1541). And while I had heard about “bulletin board systems”, the idea of storing data “elsewhere” would have seemed outlandish. Everything was “local” and would (usually) work. If you had electricity, a desk, and a chair, you were good to go.

As everyone knows, things have changed a bit since then.

We got the World Wide Web in the Mid-nineties and would still create content locally, but more and more of it would be published “elsewhere”, on servers operated by service providers. Then came content management systems, online databases, ERP software, and other fantastic beasts. Piece by piece, our data moved to other people’s computers – and so did the tools we used for creating and processing information. This is the world we inhabit today, where for most users, there’s very little “local” stuff beyond the operating system and some basic productivity applications. Slack, Notion, Google Docs and Sheets live online, while your computer is just a box with another box (the browser) in it, which holds some cached data.

This is all fine and dandy as long as everything works: your Internet connection, the remote server hosting your applications and data, your account, and, well, your complex relationship with all those SaaS providers governed by even more complex terms and conditions documents.

Getting data out of these data silos can be surprisingly hard. It’s obviously in the service providers’ interest to keep you in their digital Hotel California. Paranoia and conspiracy theories aside, it’s simply good business to have people and companies pay monthly fees for application features and rented disk space. Which begs the question: When your data is stored in databases on VMs and sent through complex templates and scripts, how much of it is still “yours”? If you stop paying for a subscription and can no longer access your files, or a hostile third party interrupts system access, where does that leave you and your business?

If you have asked yourself these questions, you are concerned about digital sovereignty. And that’s not another word for paranoia.

Digital sovereignty is a complex and interesting topic, but it boils down to “things you own and things you know”, and as so often, it’s good to have both areas covered. Having access to your files won’t help if you cannot open them or at least extract data. Put differently: No matter how slick or powerful an application may be, if there’s no easy way to get your data out of it, you should probably think twice about adding it to your arsenal.

The absence of opaque “data silos” is one of the many qualities that made me fall in love with lightweight markup languages, especially Markdown: It’s a format that was invented by someone (IT journalist John Gruber from lovely Philadelphia), but it’s not owned by him or anyone else. Markdown is basically a concept for adding markers to text, which can be interpreted both by humans (the markers “make sense”, even if you have never learned them) and machines (which can process the markers and turn them into HTML, EPUB, and other formats). It’s something you know, and there are so many tools (both free and commercial, online and offline) for processing it that it’s hard to imagine a scenario where you can’t write or publish Markdown.

Why should you care?

Because the world changes, as it usually does.

Against the backdrop of mounting transatlantic tensions, European businesses are facing an increasing number of risks to operational continuity, data privacy, and compliance. The European Union has been playing with the idea of taxing digital services for a while, which may or may not trigger US countermeasures. This means that businesses that rely on digital systems for creating, storing, processing, and publishing information (i.e., everyone) could be caught in a transatlantic crossfire. This doesn’t mean we should all return to typewriters (or good ol’ C64). But it doesn’t hurt to consider open, battle-tested data formats and lightweight tools for using them.

Converting your existing product literature (especially long-form manuals) from InDesign to Markdown may not be a magical bullet that solves all your IT problems. But it’s one step in the direction of digital sovereignty, where you get to create, share, and publish product information in the way that works for you and your business partners.

If you want to know more about digital sovereignty, you might be interested in the new 9to5 Media Services white paper on the subject. It’s yours for a song, or at least a few friendly words.

Next week: Single-Source Publishing: The Song Remains the Same

↻ 2025-10-16